Ernie Gehr's Cotton Candy
Paul M. Carter · Millennium film journal · 2003
If we try to understand and to explain the means by which music exerts its powerful effects, we do not reach our goals by describing the structure of the piano and of the violin, or by explaining the physical laws of sound. We must proceed to the psychology and ask for the mental processes of the hearing of tones and of chords, or harmonies and disharmonies, of tone qualities and tone intensities, or rhythms and phrases, and must trace how these elements are combined in the melodies and compositions. In this way we turn to the photoplay, at first with a purely psychological interest, and ask for the elementary excitements of the mind which enter into our experience of the moving pictures. - Hugo Munsterberg, The Psychology of the Photoplay, 1916(1) It could be argued that Ernie Gehr has made the question of cinematic essence his project since he first began making films in the late 1960s. From canonized early works like Serene Velocity and Still through more recent excursions such as Side/Walk/ Shuttle, his meditations on light, motion, and time are evidenced in singularly distilled forms. As a film that documents carnival toys, Cotton Candy (2001) might seem to be something of a departure from this body of work, and it is; although we find that this comic musical (as Gehr has described it), in examining the nature of modern attractions, invariably situates itself in the company of its maker's previous ontological cinematics. Cotton Candy was shot at the Musee Mechanique in San Francisco, and it begins with a pre-cinema moving picture entertainment, the mutoscope (think of a rolodex file with images on paper cards). Normally, the full frame of the image would be visible at all times, but here the camera is positioned slightly lower. We start with a view of the stack of cards and the image gradually increases, top down, one horizontal line at a time, as each card is flipped. There is elegance in the demonstration, but also an ominous reference to the scanning of an electronic screen. Cinema relies on the repetition of images in series for an illusion of movement, and the mutoscope exemplifies this effect without the use of projection. As Gehr features various mutoscope reels, he takes the liberty of stopping, starting, and advancing them at different rates. One reel takes place aboard a houseboat during a storm. A man inside opens the door to check the weather and a giant wave is there to greet him. Then suddenly the motion is gone. The action is not resolved; it simply halts on the last visible frame, leaving the wave hanging in mid-air and the man, s face caught in expectation. Slowly, the reel continues, and as the cards are turned, Gehr savors the transitions and the intermediary states. The wave crashes into the room, stops, showers the man, and stops. Still images leap to life and life freezes into photographs. The coin-operated carnival is depicted in a similar collage of starts and stops. After the opening mutoscope we see an automaton woman sitting on a bench. The previous reel featured a beautiful young female star-a mortal made eternal through photography, while this woman's paint is fading and her limbs have deteriorated. There is a carousel, a community band, boxers, food vendors, a Ferris wheel, and an airplane ride. The miniature collection suggests the fascination of Calder's circus, but the amusement park has long been dethroned by the movie house. As if in response to the resulting neglect, the gorilla rages behind bars, yet he will never escape from his cage. A mother rocks her baby carriage, but the carriage is empty. …